Undersecretary of State Patrick Kennedy pressured the FBI to unclassify certain emails from Hillary Clinton’s private server that were previously deemed classified, according to FBI documents released Monday that cited redacted sources.

In the documents, an unnamed person interviewed by the FBI said Kennedy contacted the FBI to ask for the change in classification in “exchange for a ‘quid pro quo.'”

Whether or not Clinton sent classified emails from her private server that could have jeopardized national security has become a key issue ahead of the U.S. presidential election on Nov. 8, when Clinton will face Republican nominee Donald Trump.

A representative for the State Department categorically denied that claim.

The bottom line here is that, if there was wrongdoing, nothing will be proven. The media certainly won’t question it.

After all, if Bill Clinton could arrange a private meeting with Loretta Lynch, and get the media to accept their farcical story that they were just sharing stories about their grandchildren, then this accusation doesn’t have much chance of hurting Hillary. Even if it was proven true, it would only hurt the undersecretary.

So while time and again uncorroborated statements that hurt Donald Trump are repeated by the media and taken seriously, Hillary Clinton gets a free pass. No accusation against her is ever treated as a serious matter. When they do offer criticisms, it is usually in order to hide the real problems with her behavior or the behavior of those around her.

For example, in the case of Bill Clinton’s meeting with Lynch on her jet, the media immediately criticized Bill for “bad optics” and hurting Clinton’s campaign. Those two criticisms were actually a whitewash. With no evidence, the media was telling us that the meeting was entirely innocent and that it wasn’t orchestrated by Hillary. If “reporters” had boldly asserted those two points, the people would have been more likely to doubt them. But by pushing them through mild, toothless criticism, the media convinced people who didn’t realize they were being persuaded of anything.

Rather than insisting the issue is Bill Clinton’s bad judgment, an impartial media would have considered the possibility that they had “good reason” for the meeting.

Instead, the media asked us to believe that two people with considerable experience in law and politics just happened to show bad judgment at the same time in the same place about the same issue.

Really?

A much more reasonable theory was that they had something they needed to discuss privately so they met despite the law and despite the probability that the media would discover their meeting. Plan A was to try to keep the meeting secret. Plan B was to brazen it out and claim they talked privately about their grandchildren.

And, with the help of the media, it worked.

My point is that we will never know for sure how corrupt Hillary is because all the major media is her campaign staff. If she is this immune from criticism as a candidate, what’s going to happen if she becomes President?

Joe Scudder is the "nom de plume" (or "nom de guerre") of a fifty-ish-year-old writer and stroke survivor. He lives in St Louis with his wife and still-at-home children. He has been a freelance writer and occasional political activist since the early nineties. He describes his politics as Tolkienesque.